


Lagos

by butwordsarewind (sungabraverday)



Series: Cities Headcanons [12]
Category: Paris Burning (thecitysmith)
Genre: Africa, Gen, Personified Cities
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-23
Updated: 2014-01-23
Packaged: 2018-01-09 17:47:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 381
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1149003
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sungabraverday/pseuds/butwordsarewind
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It is his chaos.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lagos

Breathe in.   
Spices waft on the breeze through the crowded market square. Throngs of women in a broad palette of browns - Yoruba, Ijaw, Igbo, Hausa, Fulani, Tiv, Kanuri, Edo, and dozens more besides - call out to onlookers in a mixture of languages. Their clothes are brighter, traditional indigos, yellows, reds, greens, and blues, or still brighter modern patterns. Behind them comes a call to prayer from the heights of slender minarets.  
Breathe out.

Breathe in.  
Hundreds of vehicles blare their horns, a cacophonous chorus of toots and air horns, and try to squeeze into gaps that don’t yet exist. Vendors weave between the cars, and trucks, and motorcycle taxis, offering water and food and clothing and trinkets and everything imaginable to those stuck in the impossible traffic. Radios play jaunty tunes that take their cues from all over globe, adding melody to the noise.  
Breathe out.

Breathe in.  
A market of narrow streets and overhanging roofs. Incense burns, overpowering everything else for a moment. Pelts of animals, false crocodile teeth, and magical tokens dangle close, remembering old gods that have yet to be forgotten.  
Breathe out.

Breathe in.  
Slums stand perched on stilts in the lagoon, a city not even on land, and so much of the rest pried from the grasp of the lagoons and creeks. They reek of human refuse, of rotting and forgotten bodies, of burning waste and the thick smoke of rubber tires. Wading in muck or poling their boats with care, some eke out a living from the things others have deemed irrelevant.  
Breathe out.

Breathe in.  
Men in sharp pressed suits, black and white, going to and from their jobs in towering new office blocks. The tallest in the country for an agency that hardly gets its job done, but it’s a symbol of hope and modernity nonetheless.   
Breathe out.

Breathe in.   
Below all of that, at the very edge of awareness, waves crash on the shore. There’s an omnipresent note of salt in the air, barely noticeable beneath everything else.  
Breathe out.

Somewhere in the middle of it all, a man with grey just starting to creep into his hair smiles. It may be chaos, but it is his chaos. His Lagos, his beautiful exquisite city. And he welcomes another child into his heart.

**Author's Note:**

> Super super heavily inspired by 419, by Will Ferguson. Which is a brilliant book; I highly recommend it.


End file.
